Blogs > Cliopatria > Standing on the island of tenure: a response to Stephen Balch

Jul 6, 2006

Standing on the island of tenure: a response to Stephen Balch


by Cliopatria


It's taken me a long time to get around to it, but I do want to respond to this Stephen Balch piece that appeared at the National Review more than three weeks ago:

The otherwise poignant Inside Higher Education story about Professor Yves Magloe, dismissed from Pasadena City College as a result of misunderstandings arising from his bipolar condition, contains a tangential but revealing comment. Another Pasadena faculty member, Hugo Schwyzer, reflecting on his role as one of Magloe's defenders, notes apropos tenure, that it allowed him "to be an advocate without risk."

Most academics and observers of academe view tenure in its putative role of allowing professors to speak freely about issues of general controversy. Tenure does, of course, sometimes facilitate such freedom. But as a device promoting wide-ranging intellectual discourse it has clearly been a failure. Debate in almost every other intellectual marketplace—including the mass media for all its tilt and spin—is far more open and diverse despite tenure's absence. Either the protections of tenure are overwhelmed by other stultifying factors, or it actually promotes stasis, conformity, and group-think.

Well, I suppose I'm pleased that Balch can find poignancy in the Magloe case (which, by the way, has gone to litigation.  The original story is here).

I'm mystified, but not surprised, by Balch's assertion that as a device promoting wide-ranging intellectual discourse it (tenure) has clearly been a failure.   In the case at hand, I talked about the protections of tenure that allowed me to reveal my own struggles with mental illness in my early years as a professor, and to make the point -- loudly -- that organic mental illness and excellent, responsible teaching were not mutually exclusive.   Balch seems to think this is somehow evidence of tenure's failure rather than its success.

In my professional life, I see the tremendous value of tenure.  Were it not for the protections of tenure, would I have dared develop and offer a highly successful course on Lesbian and Gay American History?   I'm sure it does me no credit to say that I wouldn't, and my readers can feel free to call me a coward (y'all have called me worse).  But with a spouse and a mortgage and all of the other middle-class encumbrances, I'm keenly aware of my responsibilities to provide for my family. I also remember that my initial decision to teach the course (back in 2001) was unpopular with a number of my colleagues and at least two of the trustees who oversee the college; if I hadn't had the protection of tenure but instead had been working on some sort of rolling contract, it's not a stretch to suggest that in the aftermath of offering the course, that contract might not have been renewed.

The best image I have for tenure is that of an island on which to stand.  Tenure gives me the firm ground beneath my feet that enables me to take genuine scholarly and pedagogical risks. I can innovate in the classroom, offer new courses in gender studies -- and, obviously, I can blog under my own name.  The academic blogosphere is filled with grad students and the untenured who, wisely, choose to blog using clever pseudonyms.  This blog is called "Hugo Schwyzer" both because I'm not smart enough to come up with a better title, and because I can be public about my identity without risk of repercussion within the academic community in which I work.

In the case of Yves Magloe, a colleague who was unjustly fired for his struggles with bipolar disorder, tenure did indeed allow me to be, as I said in the article Balch quotes, "an advocate without risk."  If I hadn't had tenure, I might have quietly seethed at the injustice of terminating a man in the midst of a serious manic episode.  I might even have signed a petition protesting the college's action.  But I would I have come forward, as others have now done, and "outed" myself as a professor who also has struggled with mental illness?  No, I wouldn't have.  If I were a better and braver person with fewer obligations and responsibilities, perhaps I might have done so.  But in an uncertain academic job market, in a world where prejudice against folks with backgrounds of mental illness is still pervasive, to let my colleagues, the administration, the trustees, my students, and the blogosphere all know that I have been hospitalized half a dozen times following breakdowns would be a genuinely self-destructive and foolish act.  To share the same information -- and the same promise of the possibility of full recovery and symptom management -- with tenure was infinitely easier.  It was less brave, of course.  I plead guilty to a distinct lack of heroism!

Does tenure protect some "dead wood" here at Pasadena City College?   Sure.  I can think of a few, a very few, of my colleagues who are clearly passing the time until they are eligible for a nice pension.  Their efforts are, to put it mildly, disappointing.  But for every professor who sees tenure as some sort of comfortable hammock in which to relax and avoid serious research or impassioned teaching, I can think of three who stand on tenure as on an island, using its firm support as a platform to teach prophetically.  Tenure affords us the chance to be even more zealous in our commitment to our students and their learning.  In my case, I'm a far better professor since I got tenured compared to the young, green, and decidedly irresponsible fellow I was a decade or so ago.

I don't mean to imply that there aren't adjuncts and tenure-track profs across this country who are doing great things.  It's clear that for a few, the absence of professional security does not hamper either their research or their teaching.  Tenure is not the sine qua non of academic excellence.  But tenure is not without merit, either.  The firm island it provides enables those of us who are perhaps not naturally bold to create, innovate, push to the margins.  It enables us to speak truth to power, and to intervene in gross injustices (like the Yves Magloe firing) without fear that we may be next. 

In the final analysis, my faith in God and His love for me is my surest protection.  But in my day-to-day life as a teacher and a colleague, the safety of tenure is a key component in helping me become the best faculty member and mentor I can possibly be.


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More Comments:

Dennis R. Nolan - 7/7/2006

I think you miss Balch's point, Hugo. Tenure undoubtedly does protect some expressions of controversial viewpoints. The old assumption was that if expressions were protected, the result would be a wide variety of competing voices. That simply isn't the case in most departments and most colleges, unless you consider the left half of the political and philosophical spectrum to present that wide variety.

What should be apparent is that while tenure may prevent overt retaliation by administrators, it does nothing to protect politically incorrect academics from their present or putative colleagues. Most professors would vigorously protest an administrator's attempt to punish a faculty member for uttering views that are accepted within the Academy, no matter how offensive outsiders would find those views. Too many of those same people, however, would gladly aid or tolerate a department's rejection of a conservative or libertarian applicant, or the denial of tenure to someone who challenges race preferences. And that's not even getting into the subtler forms of viewpoint discrimination that KC repeatedly points out --- creating positions for approved identity group members and refusing to hire in disfavored disciplines like military or diplomatic history.

In any event, tenure is not essential even to protect faculty speech. A simple ban on retaliation for such speech would suffice without creating the deadwood problem most faculties currently have.

Dennis R. Nolan - 7/7/2006

I think you miss Balch's point, Hugo. Tenure undoubtedly does protect some expressions of controversial viewpoints. The old assumption was that if expressions were protected, the result would be a wide variety of competing voices. That simply isn't the case in most departments and most colleges, unless you consider the left half of the political and philosophical spectrum to present that wide variety.

What should be apparent is that while tenure may prevent overt retaliation by administrators, it does nothing to protect politically incorrect academics from their present or putative colleagues. Most professors would vigorously protest an administrator's attempt to punish a faculty member for uttering views that are accepted within the Academy, no matter how offensive outsiders would find those views. Too many of those same people, however, would gladly aid or tolerate a department's rejection of a conservative or libertarian applicant, or the denial of tenure to someone who challenges race preferences. And that's not even getting into the subtler forms of viewpoint discrimination that KC repeatedly points out --- creating positions for approved identity group members and refusing to hire in disfavored disciplines like military or diplomatic history.

In any event, tenure is not essential even to protect faculty speech. A simple ban on retaliation for such speech would suffice without creating the deadwood problem most faculties currently have.

Robert KC Johnson - 7/7/2006

Hugo,

Congratulations for your efforts in helping your colleague get his job back.

I agree and slightly dissent from your post. I think the example you've outlined is the perfect case study of how the freedoms of tenure are supposed to work--without it, you wouldn't have had the safety net to go public with your story. From my standpoint, I certainly wouldn't be willing to publicly criticize the CUNY union without the protections of tenure--anyone untenured who did so would be out of a job the next year at any CUNY school but Baruch, and everyone knows it.

But there are a couple of concerns I have. One, of course, is the deadwood issue. What do you do, say, in a department where scholarship is supposed to be the prime factor for promotion and tenure, and you have three 30+-year veterans who collectively have published less than 200 pages in their careers, with no books between them? There has to be a way, perhaps through some minimal form of post-tenure review, to move such people along.

Second--and here's where I agree with Balch--there's a conundrum. Tenure was supposed to promote academic freedom. Yet too often, tenure is used as a club: junior faculty are afraid to speak out, lest they alienate senior colleagues. Do you have a model designed to protect professors from outside pressure--but what happens when a critical threat to academic freedom is coming from within the academy itself?

There's obviously no easy answer (perhaps no answer at all) to that question.